Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello All,

This is my situation and I am new to perl scripting so I am trying to figure out the best way to tackle this problem. I need help in creating the logic to analyze the data.

Problem: I need to access an oracle database, gather information from a specific query and then analyze the query results. There are two pieces of information that are retrieved from the db, a number and a name. I need to analyze the number as well as the name. For the number it will have to be between 500 or 1000 to be acceptable. For the name I will have a static list and the query name will have to be on the list if it is not then an error will have to be outputted.

What I have done so far:
I am using the perl dbi/dbd module with oracle. I am able to access the db, run the query, and get the results from the db. I am gathering the information into an array ref. To print it out just to see the output I run a foreach.

Code:

my $array_ref = $sth->fetchall_arrayref();

foreach my $row (@$array_ref) {
    ### Split the row up and print each field ...
    my ( $feeder_qty, $feeder ) = @$row;
    print "Items: $feeder_qty, from feeder $feeder\n";
}

Question: My issue is how can I put my conditional logic in? Is an array_ref the correct method? I am trying to grab the data, close the db connection and then process the data. Trying to keep any database connection activity to a minimum. Can I manipulate the array_ref similar to the way the foreach statement does?

Thank you in advance,
-jack